Traditionally, targeted advertisement insertion in networks depends on the advertisement being delivered to a Set Top Box (STB). The STB is a device that connects to a television and an external signal source which converts the signal into content. The content is then displayed on a television screen. In one traditional solution, customized content inserted in the payload on a frame is sent to the STB via unicast. In another approach, multiple content streams are sent concurrently from a source all the way to the STB via different multicast streams. The STB can also tune into a channel, meaning tuning into a different multicast stream, carrying a target advertisement. To this end, the STB needs to precisely determine when to tune into the other multicast stream.
Advertisement insertion in traditional solutions is often based on Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) 35 and SCTE 30 signaling that was developed for the Cable TV industry. These solutions often provide limited targeting capability, such as to a region, city or serving area constrained by the construction of the distribution network. If addressability is to be achieved for finer granularity, such as to a neighborhood or household, then certain bandwidth is dedicated to the serving household or neighborhood individually. Such a solution does not scale well. These solutions that offer a STB providing advertisement insertion may use a different mechanism than the ones offering traditional network based insertion. Therefore, two different mechanisms are required: live content distribution and STB stored advertisement insertion. Moreover, complex synchronization and insertion functions are required to be located in the STB thus leading to a very complex and expensive STB implementation.
Another mechanism is to merge the ads or other supplementary content at the DSLAM level. The customized ads are delivered to the DSLAM separately via different multicast groups right before the splice time. The DSLAM may keep a table to map multicast groups to outgoing ports. The DSLAM buffers the incoming ads, then evaluates the splice time of the incoming packets in the main program. At the splice time, the DSLAM delivers the buffered ads to respective users instead of the main program. This method requires buffering at the DSLAM and also precise splicing capabilities. Since precise merging capability is an expensive feature, such a system may become prohibitively expensive when every DSLAM employs such capabilities. Another deficiency for this mechanism is the fact that the STBs receive the splice time information. Since splice time information is available, the STBs may be configured to prohibit display of ads.
Therefore, what is needed is a mechanism that overcomes the described problems and limitations.